At 19:49 -0700 7/8/1999, Jungshik Shin
(Seoul‘ώ?)
wrote:
>On Wed, 7 Jul 1999, Edward Cherlin
(SeoulΏΒψ΅±½,
SeoulΜΒΑ΅)
wrote:
>
>> I am a great believer in not multiplying entities beyond necessity,
one of
>> the later formulations of Ockham's suggestion. No, after 11,172
Johab
>> glyphs were promoted to characters, what's one or two, or three, or
...How
>
> What do you think adding 11,172 Hangul *syllables* into Unicode
2.0
>has to do with what you're talking about, namely glyph (variants) vs
>character? You're mixing up totally different two issues here: glyph
>(variants) vs characters and pre-composed characters vs their
>components. Allocating 11,172 spots for a single script is
>controversial. However, NOT for the reason you cited here.
>
> Jungshik Shin
According to the principles of Unicode design, combining forms and
composites were to be promoted to Unicode characters only if they were
already in some previous character set standard. Arabic ligatures
qualify under that rule. My personal opinion is that the line on
composites should have been drawn *before* taking in
Seoul‘«', on the grounds that
they entered a standard after Unicode was created. Now that
Seoul‘«' are in, I don't argue
for removing them. Dotless j clearly doesn't qualify.
It is true that the cases of dotless j, Arabic ligatures, and
Seoul‘«' are not the same,
since dotless j is a combining form (but not a variant glyph for a
standalone j) for rendering composite character sequences, while Arabic
ligatures and Seoul‘«' are
composites for rendering sequences of Arabic characters or
SeoulΏ½ respectively.
However, these cases all have to do with rendering composites, either
as pre-composed glyphs or as arrangements of combining glyphs. The
glyphs in each case do not have to be Unicode characters in order to
support correct rendering of Unicode text. It would have been easier to
implement Unicode if all of them had been provided as (combining or
precomposed) glyphs in fonts, and not characters in Unicode.
When I was first learning to type in
Seoul«-±€ (Ϊ»ΏͺΑ₯Πψ―Ώ½
ΊψΤ₯Ξ«-±Ί"‘ώΜ΅Σ«-±ψ°Ί 1967ψ°), I was using a
manual typewriter with three shift levels to provide variant combining
glyphs for each SeoulΏ½. It
is far easier to type Seoul«-±€
on a computer where the IME lets me type them as characters rather than
glyphs, and looks up the rendering for each syllable. I would never
compose Seoul«-±Ό½ͺ in
Seoul‘«'. What good are they
as Unicode characters, then?
--
Edward Cherlin edward.cherlin.sy.67@aya.yale.edu
"It isn't what you don't know that hurts you, it's
what you know that ain't so."--Mark Twain, or else
some other prominent 19th century humorist and wit